Commentary Magazine

She’s a Keeper

I was saddened when I heard about the recent defenestration of the journalist Elizabeth Drew from the New York Review of Books, where she had been writing about Washington for many years. Drew embodies important elements in the life of the capital. She began her career nearly 60 years ago, covering Capitol Hill for Congressional Quarterly, an experience that gave her a high tolerance for wonkery. She went on to the Atlantic Monthly, where she learned to write long. From there she was plucked by the legendary editor William Shawn to succeed the legendary Richard Rovere as Washington correspondent for the—yes—legendary New Yorker. Working in a town and trade that rewards survival and resilience above all things, she herself has long since been declared legendary.

The no-longer legendary editor Tina Brown took over the New Yorker in 1992 and made it one of her first orders of business to fire Drew. Brown replaced her with the sometime journalist and full-time crank Sidney Blumenthal. Drew, as one befitting her stature must be, was an orthodox liberal, genus establishmentus, with none of Blumenthal’s crude and naked activism. Blumenthal saw journalism as a weapon. Drew used it as a means of maintaining the genteel status quo, drawing attention, in the fashion of Miss Manners, to the Republican barbarians who had breached the gates and put their feet up on the coffee table.

We will continue to be able to read Drew’s stuff at a website called project-syndicate.org, but it’s a step down from NYRB. (Actually, after the death of its founder Robert Silvers and under its new editor Ian Buruma, NYRB may be a step down from NYRB.) Drew deserves a more august perch than a website with a silly name. Her status in Washington is singular, not simply because of her longevity and magazine pedigree, and not because she has written 16 books, more than many of her colleagues on the Web have ever read.

I like to think of Elizabeth Drew as Washington’s Keeper of the Narratives. A narrative is an abstract story line that changes little over time and into which smart, progressive Washingtonians can plug contemporary personalities and events to make them understandable, whether by similarity or contrast. In this way, all educated, progressive Washingtonians know they will be reading, so to speak, from the same prayer book.

There are several Washington narratives, most of which have their roots in events going back no further than the 1950s. And so we have the Cuban Missile Crisis Narrative—a tale of derring-do in which a canny president, with the subtle counsel of a far-seeing aide, his brother perhaps, icily confronts our enemy and calls his bluff, thus saving the world from a horrendous fate. (The Cuban Missile Crisis didn’t really happen like this, of course, but narratives do not depend on historical accuracy.)

There is the Narrative of the Tragic Presidency, in which a gifted and strong but flawed leader boldly brings the country closer to the statist paradise even as his dark side drags it into an unwinnable quagmire. The Pentagon Papers Narrative showcases courageous whistleblowers and a press corps that will not be deterred in its pursuit of truth. There is the Narrative of the Divided White House, a hardy perennial, in which one group of aides, called “moderates” or “pragmatists” by the press, wages a war for the “soul of the presidency” against another group of aides, called “ideologues.”

Every administration gets suited up with the Divided White House Narrative at some point; Donald Trump’s is just the latest to succumb, and Ronald Reagan’s never outgrew it. The Pentagon Papers Narrative is also ongoing, most recently with Julian Assange as the hero, until he broke the narrative flow and became a bad guy, not at all like that brave Daniel Ellsberg. Bill Clinton’s White House was fit into the Tragic Presidency Narrative originally applied to the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Bill Clinton—able, smart, stuffed with charm, oozing political savvy—was shown lifting the country from the HWBushian darkness into the light of Democratic peace and prosperity even as he was brought low by his own personal Vietnam, who was wearing a thong.

More than once Barack Obama was draped in the Cuban Missile Crisis Narrative. His iciness was undeniable, though how canny he was remains an open question. But his far-seeing aide, John Kerry, was a Kennedy wannabe from Massachusetts, and when the time came to stare down the nuke-craving mullahs and call their bluff, Obama rose to the narrative by striking the Iran nuclear deal, thereby saving the world from cataclysm. It says so right here in the narrative.

Drew is handy with all these narratives, able to keep one spinning on the tip of a pool cue even as she balances another on her forehead while lifting a third with her big toe. As Keeper of the Narratives, though, she has particular responsibility for the crown jewel. Drew covered the Watergate scandal in weekly dispatches for the New Yorker and has been closely associated with it ever since. She even appears in the movie adaptation of All the President’s Men, which, although admittedly fictionalized and largely debunked, is to Washington narratives what the epic of Gilgamesh is to quest literature.

Drew’s Watergate articles became a book, called Washington Journal. I reread it the other day. It is droll, knowing, discursive, full of flavorsome detail, a worthy and appealing work of higher journalism. It is also animated by a subcutaneous vein of hysteria. Actually, it’s hysteria and delight all mixed together, for in Washington the two are always commingling. We Washingtonians are an excitable people. We feed off crises, draw strength from the Republic’s misfortune. I recall a remark from Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post (yeah, he was legendary, too), during the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s. The official position of the Washington establishment was that Iran-Contra, like Watergate before it, was a grave threat to the Constitution, indeed to the existence of self-government. No laughing matter, in other words. And yet: “I haven’t had so much fun since Watergate,” Bradlee said. That’s the emotional life of the capital, indiscreetly expressed.

And Drew is its truest representative. On the first page of her Watergate book, in an entry dated September 4, 1973, she told us: “Historic events are coming at us now with a swiftness and in a profusion never before experienced in our national life.” I am sure that every Washingtonian of Drew’s acquaintance—and she knows everybody—agreed with that statement at the time, despite the inconvenient fact that it wasn’t even remotely true. (Had they ever heard of the Civil War? The Great Depression? Two world wars? The spring and summer of 1968? Hell, what about the Panic of 1837? ) But this is the pitch of life when smart, progressive Washingtonians hitch themselves to the Watergate Narrative, as they have been doing over the last six months with the curiously ill-defined scandal involving President Trump and the Russians.

Elizabeth Drew, acting ex officio, is in the forefront, writing stylishly, drawing on her genuinely deep well of experience, to explain why Trump’s scandal is likely to unfold according to the familiar Watergate story line, “when we almost lost our democratic system,” as she once put it. As Keeper of the Narrative, she has even delighted her fellow Washingtonians by daring to entertain the giddy pleasure of President Trump’s possible impeachment. Judged on the facts in hand, such a possibility is inconceivably remote, but how thrilling it is to think it! The Narrative demands nothing less, and the job of its Keeper is to show us the way.

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We decided to do our version of The Handmaid’s Tale and try to imagine the world in 2019 from two perspectives: One in which Democrats fail to win the House of Representatives in November and the other in which Democrats win handily. What will they do in each case? What will Republicans do? Give a listen.

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In November 1995, COMMENTARY published a symposium called “The National Prospect” in which dozens of writers offered their view of America’s possible future. I just went and looked at my entry in that symposium, which I had not thought of in years, because of Laura Ingraham’s statement on TV last night that “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like … this is related to both illegal and legal immigration.”

What my symposium entry indicates is that views like hers have been percolating on the Right for decades. I thought you might find it interesting to read:

***

“This is not the country my father fought for,” a one-time colleague who grew up as an Army brat was telling me over lunch five years ago. He sang a threnody of national faults, and I could only hang my head in mute agreement—crime, multiculturalism, educational collapse, everything conservatives have worried over and fought against for twenty years or more.

He grew more and more excited. From multiculturalism, he began talking about the threat posed by immigrants, and from that threat to the threat posed by native-born blacks. As he was taken over by his passion and imagined me an ally in it, he began dropping words into his monologue that in his calmer moments he never would have used with me, words like “nigger” and “wetback” I had heard used only in rages and then only maybe twice before outside of a movie or TV show. And then, forgetting himself entirely, he allowed as how Jews were blocking the true story of our national decline.

It is not only inconvenient to hear words you might have spoken coming out of the mouth of a racist, nativist anti-Semite. It is also a reminder that ideas you hold dear may be used as weapons in a war you never intended to fight—a war in which those weapons may be turned against you just as my one-time colleague turned his assault on multiculturalism into an assault on Jews.

This is my warning as we consider the national prospect. Those who believe America is in a period of cultural decline are obviously correct; I am not at all sure how anyone of good will could argue otherwise.

And yet, and yet, and yet. It is one thing to worry over and battle against the dumbing-down of our schools; the assault on taste, standards, and truth posed by multiculturalism; the rise of repellent sexual egalitarianism; even the dangers of advanced consumerism are becoming increasingly worrisome.

But it is quite another thing to make the leap from that point to the notion that the nation itself is in parlous and irreversible decline. After all, nations are always in parlous moral health; nations are gatherings of people, and people are sinners. When the United States was putatively healthier, back in the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s, 12 percent of its population was living in de-facto or de-jure immiseration and the Wasp majority protected its position in the elite by means of explicit quotas and exclusions.

The declinists are both wrong and spiritually noxious. After all, the purpose of declaring the nation in decline is to root out the causes of the decline, extirpate them, and put the nation on the road to health. But, for some of them, the search for causes always leads to blacks, immigrants, and Jews. In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Harvard’s own Quentin Compson finds himself suicidal over America’s conversion into the “land of the kike home of the wop.”

Blacks and Jews are ever the inevitable, juicy target—so inevitable that they still find a link in the fevered minds of the paleo-Right, even though all blacks and Jews have in common now is the way the paleo-Right links them.

What blacks, Jews, and immigrants always seem to lack in the eyes of declinists is some version of the American character—that which my one-time colleague believed his father to have fought for. The dark underbelly of the American political experiment is the very idea of an American character itself. It is, fundamentally, an un-American idea. It is the nature of America that there is no one American character. Demography is not destiny in America as it is everywhere else; where you come from is not who you are.

I can find no quarrel with the brief of particulars offered by the declinists. But their central idea gives heart and strength to people whose threnodies can sound like the song of the siren—and must, like the siren’s song, be resisted by all strong men.

–Nov. 1, 1995

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Does liberal opinion permit Europeans to discuss the burka openly, honestly, and fearlessly?

The answer is almost certainly “no,” judging by the furious reaction that greeted Boris Johnson’s recent remarks on the full face veil donned by many fundamentalist Muslim women. “If you tell me that the burka is oppressive then I am with you,” the former U.K. foreign secretary wrote in a recent column for the Telegraph newspaper. “I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letterboxes.”

The left and much of the right assailed him, including his ex-boss, Prime Minister Theresa May. The main charge was that Johnson suffers from a dangerous and likely incurable condition: “Islamophobia.” Few of his many critics bothered to note that Johnson was writing in opposition to a Danish ban on the burka. Johnson is unquestionably burka-phobic, but there is scant evidence, either in his column or his long public career, that he is any sort of anti-Muslim bigot.

The column was classic “BoJo.” Johnson is the jocular type—Britons would say “cheeky”—perhaps to a fault. But more than most of the dullards who rise to the higher echelons in Europe, he has his finger on the popular pulse. Johnson knows that anxiety over the burka courses through the whole European body politic.

Few native Europeans dare voice it honestly. If a former top diplomat is raked over the intersectionality coals for doing so, imagine what would happen to Average Joe. But the anxiety is real enough. And it is legitimate, because the sight of the burka in the public square crystalizes the sense that European immigration and assimilation policy has gone horribly wrong. Concluding that this is so isn’t tantamount to hatred.

Constantly bottling up anxiety, moreover, is no less unhealthy for a collective psyche than it is for the individual. Allow me, then, to voice my own burka­-phobia as a former resident of the U.K., who had grown accustomed to, say, landing at Heathrow Airport and finding myself surrounded by fully veiled faces on the express train to central London.

Actually, “accustomed” isn’t the right word, for I never quite got used to eyes without a face—to the encounter with a hidden subject, who was free to gaze into my features but who deflected my attempts to reciprocate her gaze. Eyes Without a Face, incidentally, is the title of a chilling cult horror flick from 1960, which attests to the fact that most people find free-floating, disembodied, faceless eyes deeply disturbing. (Sometimes even the eyes were hidden behind a thin mesh screen, a mechanism that completely erased the individuality of this Other.)

So, no, I never got accustomed to the burka. But it was an encounter that I had no choice but to tolerate. I was born and raised in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Muslim veiling was thus not alien to me. Imagine, then, the discomfort of the plumber or electrician from London’s more blue-collar precincts. Now add to that cultural discomfort a prohibition against expressing any discomfort, enforced on pain of social ostracism and joblessness. It’s a recipe for populist backlash.

Does all this mean that I would support a blanket ban against the full-face veil? Probably not. As much as I fret about the incohesive society bred by the burka’s presence in Europe, I also worry about the Continent’s high-handed secular progressivism. I wouldn’t want to give state agents the right to regulate religious practices in Europe, because I’m sure that those agents would go out of their way to target faithful Jews and Christians, not least to shield themselves from the same charge of Islamophobia that they casually hurl at the likes of Johnson.

But I do think that Europeans have a right to deplore the burka. Western civilization locates the dignity of men and women in their individuality, including in their facial features. The liberal reflex to silence, in the name of tolerance, those who insist on the real virtues and character of European civilization will only further radicalize the opposition. Such liberal illiberalism is not a little like a vast burka forcibly wrapped around the European mind.

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As the saying goes, you can never put the toothpaste back in the tube. Donald Trump is setting a number of precedents, many of which conservatives and Republicans will come to regret when they are cited and expanded upon by the Democrats who succeed him. But Trump’s status as a figure of cultural gravitas is not one of those precedents. Trump is only building upon a legacy that was bequeathed to him by his predecessor.

New York Times opinion writer, author, and Columbia University Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan has authored a thoughtful essay on the nature of fame. As a transgender activist and a former reality television star, she knows what it is like to be famous. She’s written a valuable exploration of a sought-out status that once achieved is often regretted. But her jumping off point—presidential fame, as opposed to influence and authority—deserves more attention.

“In considering the question of fame, though, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that the current occupant of the White House is less interested in the good works he might bring about than the fame that comes with the position,” Boylan writes of Donald Trump. Fame is a condition that comes with the oath of office, but Trump secured his fame long ago and took it with him into the White House. That kind of fame—fame for the sake of personal aggrandizement and not toward some noble end—tends to be corrupting, Boylan writes, and is often a source of regret for those who achieve it. Though she might believe the fame that Barack Obama achieved in office was a burden he bore in service to the greater good, Boylan nevertheless notes that the 44th president came to regret his notoriety. At least, that’s what he claimed.

“Barack Obama, appearing on Jerry Seinfeld’s show ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’ a couple of years ago, seemed to regret being one of the world’s most famous people,” she writes. A world-famous comedian’s comedy talk show is an odd choice of venue for confessing one’s discomfort with the spotlight. “In particular,” Boylan continues, “the president lamented, he missed the ability to just walk down the street talking with a friend unnoticed.” If Obama truly lamented his celebrity, he would have performed a more thoughtful audit of its effects not just on his life but on those around him and the country he led. It would be interesting to probe the former president’s thoughts on the matter today, particularly given his unique successor.

Barack Obama and his allies chafed at a 2008 campaign spot that implied he was more of an empty suit than a candidate of substance, but none could credibly deny the president sought out and achieved “Celebrity.” Obama made numerous appearances on non-news programs like “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert and David Letterman, “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “American Idol,” “MythBusters,” “Ellen,” “Running Wild with Bear Grylls,” and so on. The president gave ESPN exclusive broadcast access to his NCAA brackets and joked with his favorite FM radio hosts. “People get their news in many different ways,” Obama’s campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki told Politico. “Sometimes it’s turning on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and seeing what the latest news is out there.”

He was described as “too good” at social media. The former president demonstrated a knack for engaging with the young and hip on platforms that reward brevity and platitudes and punishes depth and sincerity. The first family mastered tweeting gifs, Snapchatting playful family moments, and Instagramming impromptu White House dance sessions and presidential posing sessions alongside George Clooney.

Obama’s appearance with Seinfeld occurred in 2015, and it was hardly the first or last time the president sought out forgiving alternative media venues. The former president’s IMDb page lists the accolades more often associated with a teen heartthrob than a commander-in-chief. The president received two Grammy awards and an Image award before he assumed the presidency, nominations for Teen Choice Awards, Kid’s Choice Awards, Mashable’s Tweet of the Year, and, of course, winner of the 2014 Streamy Award for best collaboration (with comedian Zach Galifianakis). The White House communications team deserved that honor more than the president. It was the White House Office of Public Engagement that organized a series of presidential sit-downs with the friendly and unchallenging young hosts of online media outlets, deliberately bypassing the legacy press in the process.

Republicans sneered at all of this, and many civically minded conservatives were sincere. But many more Republicans were envious. They wanted a Republican president who could avoid hard news interviews and press conferences and be praised for his media savvy. They wanted a Republican president who could lob tweets over the heads of the press. They wanted a Republican Obama—a president with universal cultural cachet. And they got it.

There will be some Democrats who refuse to recognize how Trump is building on Obama’s expanded definition of what it means to be presidential because they like Obama’s tweets and celebrity friends and dislike Trump’s. Raw partisanship and motivated reasoning will get you far. But no one could honestly deny that Obama’s warm embrace of celebrity helped deliver us into a new era of political reality television. To quote the former president, one of our biggest collective challenges “is the degree to which we do not share a common baseline of facts.” At least, that’s what he said on David Letterman’s new show on Netflix.

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If you’re a Republican, the polls must be making you nervous. And I’m not talking about the generic congressional ballot or the president’s job approval rating.

In the Trump era, a majority of voters have told pollsters that the wealthy and corporations have too much power, that the financial industry is under-regulated, and that the economy is rigged against them. More than half of voters favor a $15 national minimum wage, regardless of the displacing effects it will have on low-skilled and entry-level workers. Six out of 10 Americans say “it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage” and about half of all Americans support the creation of a government monopoly on health insurance.

This remarkable consensus is due, primarily, to Democratic unity on policy. Where there is real internal tension and, thus, opportunity for Republicans is less about what the Democratic Party’s coalition should strive to achieve but what it should look like.

“I have a problem, guys, with that phrase, ‘identity politics,’” Senator Kamala Harris told a gathering of progressives at the annual Netroots Nation conference this weekend. “That phrase is used to divide, and it is used to distract. Its purpose is to minimize and marginalize issues that impact all of us. It is used to try and shut us up.” Harris’s attempt to stigmatize attacks on the liberal conception of “identity politics” as a “pejorative” is a savvy preemptive effort to neutralize what may be the left’s biggest weakness: its commitment to racial and demographic hierarchies.

The liberal conundrum was perhaps best illustrated by a collection of protesters who later stormed the Netroots Nation stage. According to the Advocate’s Alex Westwood, the demonstrators attacked the conference for hosting panels dedicated to combating the “white savior” phenomenon. Such panels were considered problematic because they amounted to a demand that minorities volunteer their time to teach white people how to do that which minorities were already doing. Worse, those demands were made “from a position of white comfort.”

Netroots watchers, such as Westwood, would be quick to note that a collection of malcontents disrupts proceedings every year, but it’s of note that this collection is almost always doggedly focused on issues related to race. In 2015, Black Lives Matter activists targeted the self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders for being insufficiently committed to racial justice. Last year, demonstrators shouted down U.S. House Rep. Stacey Evans, a former chair of the state’s Democratic House Caucus, for challenging Stacey Abrams in the gubernatorial primary because she was the first black woman to lead her party in the state’s legislature. “Trust black women,” they shouted.

This contingent may lack raw numerical strength, but it enjoys outsize influence over the political discourse and, thus, the Democratic Party. What’s more, the intra-party dispute threatens to expose deeper fissures within the Democrats’ ascendant progressive wing. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me,’” Sanders argued in 2016. “This is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” This line was opportunistically savaged for being insufficiently “woke” by Hillary Clinton’s communications team, but self-identified democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appears to have internalized Sanders’s admonition.

She leaned into her identity as a Latina woman from the Bronx while savaging those who rely on their accidents of birth to prove progressive bona fides. Her message was lost on Democracy for America spokesman Neil Sroka, who is campaigning on behalf of a progressive Muslim candidate for governor of Michigan recently endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez. “Other than Cynthia Nixon in New York, they are also overwhelmingly young and people of color,” Sroka said of 2018’s class of progressive insurgents, “which also speaks to a rising belief that we need to have leaders of the party who reflect the party, which means more young people, women, and people of color in positions of power.” Nixon, the only exception to the rule Sroka was trying to illustrate, was heralded as the first potential governor of New York who is also openly gay.

Liberals in good standing have warned of the dangers that Democrats face if they dedicate themselves to the kind of divisive identity politics that “breeds its equal and opposite reaction” in the form of a collective racial consciousness among white Americans. Indeed, it will be too tempting for Republicans to avoid following in Donald Trump’s lead and exacerbating racial tensions within the Democratic coalition to siphon off the votes of alienated whites. “We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism,” wrote Columbia University professor Mark Lilla. His recommendation came not just from a place of concern for national comity, but with the best interests of the electoral strength of the Democratic Party in mind.

The progressive left is having none of this. “Apologizing for ‘identity politics’ precipitates an electoral death spiral,” wrote Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Steve Philips, “because it doesn’t work to woo Trump voters, who will always opt for the real racist, and it also depresses the enthusiasm of the very voters we need to win.”

Identity, not economics, is where the fault lines lie within the Democratic coalition. Traditional liberals, even progressives, are not convinced that appeals to racial and demographic solidarity will win back Democratic majorities. The identitarian left is convinced that making overtures toward Donald Trump’s white working-class voters represents a compromise with the unenlightened and racially suspect. And that is where the fight will be; not over Medicare-for-all but over social and racial justice.

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